Weather

This was our last major home school topic. It was a great summer, and I feel like the kids learned a lot.

In fact, Seth has made major leaps in reading and writing. We worked on things a little bit at a time, so that he didn't ever get frustrated or sick of it, but suddenly it was like a light turned on, and he was suddenly reading! He is sounding out words to write them, as well, and I am loving some of the stuff he comes up with.

Here is Seth reading on one of the first days after he realized he could do it himself!

Hannah's love for science has only deepened. She is so inquisitive, and has been known to ask really thoughful questions days or even weeks after something struck her fancy. I love it! She has become a great journal writer, and loves to makes lists and answer questions in her journals. She also loves to take her encyclopedias and transcribe them into notebooks. Not sure what she sees in that process, but OK!

As for Weather:

Here is what the kids had to say in the pre-interview:
Hannah: There's sunny, cloudy, rainy, half cloudy, half sunny, and half rainy. Weather can be harmful or calm.
Seth: It can be sunny and rainy, cloudy and stormy, and half light and half dark. Gas makes the sun. It gets really hot, really cold, and really icy.

So we went through books and talked about different types of weather. We talked about how the earth's rotations makes the weather change. We talked about severe weather, normal weather changes, seasons, the water cycle, and lightning and thunder. We talked about various tools used to measure the weather. We talked about how we would dress based on the weather. We talked about the different types of clouds and named them. We talked about why they look the way they do.

We did a couple of simple experiments. We put ice cubes and salt in this metal bowl, and watched it for about 20 minutes. Here is is after just a few minutes...condensation, and freezing already starting!
Then when we checked it again after the full 20 minutes, it looked like this!
I told them how the air all around us has moisture in it, but it's not cold enough to feel like water or ice, but when it comes near a colder area, like a glass filled with ice, or this metal bowl, the water in the air condenses and either turns to water or ice, depending on how cold it is. They thought this was cool because they had always thought that the water sort of "leaked" through the glass when a glass had ice in it.

The second experiment was more complicated, but very cool. Basically we were making a cloud in a bottle. Hannah got this cool science book called Pop Bottle Science for her birthday from her Aunt Marcie. It comes with a few simple items (like a pop bottle) and you can do 79 experiments with it.

Step 1: Add two inches of hot water into your pop bottle.
Step 2: Blow into the bottle to fill it completely with air, and then cap it.
Step 3: Shake the bottle for one minute. This mixes the water into the air molecules.Step 4: Light a match...let it burn for a couple of seconds, and then blow it out. Quickly uncap the bottle and drop the match in, and recap. Step 5: Lay the bottle on its side and push down on the bottle as hard as you can. Rick was better at this part than I was. You can see the cloud forming in the bottle, and condensation will occur on the inside of the bottle. Step 6: When you see the cloud, uncap the bottle and let the cloud out. We had to squeeze the bottle a couple of times for the cloud to escape. The dark colored paper was there so that you could see the cloud better. (I amped up the contrast on this picture so that you can see the cloud swirling up from the bottle better. You could see it pretty well in person, but it's hard to get good pictures of it!)
Essentially what is happening is that clouds are made of water vapor, air, and particles of dust. We added the match so that the burnt soot would dirty up the air and make the cloud more visible.

This one was a lot of fun because right around the time that we did this lesson, we had a lot of thunderstorms in the area. The kids were able to see all the types of clouds we had learned about, and looked at lightning and thunder in a whole new way.

The post-interview:
Seth: They use special tools to catch up to storms so they know what it is like. There are tornadoes. When it's wintry weather, you would want to wear gloves and a jacket and a scarf. Lightning comes first before thunder. Air crashes and makes thunder.
Hannah: There are different kinds of clouds. There's cumulus...like poofy clouds. I learned the water cycle. The water goes up to the clouds and the clouds fill up with rain so it comes down and then the sun evaporates it into the air and it does it over and over again. Thunder happens when the air explodes from the lightning and pushes the water in the air.

Next week: nothing. We are finished, but I will probably add a few things here and there throughout the year. I want to keep track of ideas so that I can use them with the Round 2 children, MaKaty and Cru. Until next time...